Eau the Bottle

One of the perks of my day job is I occasionally get free fragrances. In the almost 8 years I’ve been there, my wife and I have amassed a drawerful, and that’s just the ones we kept for ourselves. The majority of what I received have been given as birthday and holiday gifts. Seriously, it’s been that much.

The ones we decide to keep have depended on the fragrance, obviously, but also on the bottle design. In terms of fragrances, after a while you start to notice that there’s only 5 or 6 main types and each fragrance is a variation on type. It’s the bottle design that I want to show you today, specifically the work of 2 design firms.

The first is Through Smoke, a firm based just north of San Francisco in Saulsalito. They design fragrance bottles as well as some bottles for wine and spirits.

The other designer whose work my wife and I love is Chad Lavigne. Chad graduated from RISD and spent years at L’Oreal and LVMH before he formed his own studio in 2002. I like his clean, elegant designs that have a technical complexity, like the pointed V-shape interior on the Michael Kors bottle below, a near impossible feat to achieve in blown glass, according to a June 2007 article in the now defunct House & Garden magazine.